Rebels at sea, p.12
Rebels at Sea, page 12
Etching, circa 1781, showing St. Eustatius being attacked by British warships. The attack ended with the British capture of the island from the Dutch.
At roughly the same time that Bingham was in Martinique, scheming to support privateers and fuel animosity between France and England, other American agents were involved in similar efforts across the Atlantic. In March 1776 the Committee of Secret Correspondence appointed former congressional delegate Silas Deane, a lawyer and merchant, as an envoy to France. Like Bingham, he was to present himself as a merchant intent on trade but was also instructed to provide intelligence to the committee, and to cultivate a relationship with the French government with the goal of convincing the country to aid the Americans. Also like Bingham, Deane quickly discovered that the French were more than willing to help American privateers. By December Deane was writing to fellow committee member John Jay to tell him that “blank commissions are wanted here” to allow French sailors to cruise under the American flag: “This is a capital stroke and must bring on a war”—a war in which Deane expected that the French would ally themselves with America against their joint enemy, Britain.
Silas Deane, circa 1783.
In another letter to the committee, Deane made clear that outfitting American privateers in France was not only eminently feasible but could be done stealthily, and that it would redound greatly to America’s advantage. “It is certainly . . . a very practicable and safe plan to arm a ship here as if [it were a merchantman heading] for the coast of Africa or the West Indies,” and to have that ship stay in port until a valuable British ship leaves from England. At that point, the armed ship, or privateer, could leave the French port, capture the British ship, and bring it to America. When the British ship arrived, it could be added to the American navy, while its cargo could supply the country.
Deane was soon joined in France by Benjamin Franklin, who came over in late 1776. With Virginia doctor and lawyer Arthur Lee, they formed a three-man diplomatic mission intent on negotiating a formal alliance with France. Congress viewed the negotiations as critical. On December 21, 1776, the congressional Committee of Foreign Affairs wrote to the members of the mission clarifying how important it was that the French declare their support for the American cause. For France’s own sake, or course. The military force that Britain had brought to bear in America, the likelihood of British reinforcements, and the perilous state of American finances “all conspire to prove, incontestably, that if France desires to preclude the possibility of North America being ever reunited with Great Britain, now is the favorable moment for establishing the glory, strength, and commercial greatness of the former kingdom, by the ruin of her ancient rival. A decided part now taken by the Court of Versailles, and a vigorous engagement in the war, in union with North America,” would vanquish the British fleet and army, and run them from the continent.
This engraving shows the Continental navy brig Reprisal, captained by Lambert Wickes, being chased by a British cruiser in late 1776. Benjamin Franklin was on board, along with two of his grandsons; Franklin was being taken to France to begin his tenure as one of the American commissioners. It was an eventful trip. Not only was the Reprisal chased by British cruisers, but it also captured two British prizes along the way. Since Wickes was under orders from Congress to keep his famous passenger out of danger, he asked Franklin’s permission before engaging the first prize. Franklin assented, and Wickes followed up with the second capture a short while later. The Reprisal arrived in France’s Quiberon Bay on November 29, 1776, the first Continental navy ship in European waters. Bad weather kept Franklin on board for a few days, and finally, on December 3, he and his grandsons were placed on a fishing boat and taken to shore at Auray, eventually making their way to Nantes.
In addition to seeking an alliance, the members of the diplomatic mission had also been tasked by Congress with persuading France to allow American privateers to sell their prizes in France at French ports (not just in Martinique), and to protect those privateers while that business was being conducted. There was yet another privateering initiative that Franklin wanted to pursue. Like Deane, he hoped to commission American privateers to sail from French ports—captained by Americans, manned by Frenchmen. Both men believed that privateering would make war between France and England more likely. Thus began an intricate diplomatic dance involving the French, the British, and the Americans.
David Murray, 2nd Earl of Mansfield, or Lord Stormont, as he was more commonly known, was the British ambassador to France. Cultured, sociable, excitable, and paranoid, Stormont was to keep an eye on French activity, most notably any actions that might benefit the American colonies. He viewed Franklin’s arrival with grave concern. “I have intelligence from America,” he wrote to Lord Weymouth, secretary of state for the Southern Department (which included the American colonies). “Franklin is come with his pocket full of letters of marque, and . . . his intention is to engage French ships, fit those ships with men of this country, and by putting an American or two on board, and giving letters of marque, try to make these vessels pass for American Privateers.”
Stormont demanded a meeting with the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, to see if the rumor was true and, more importantly, what France would do if it was. Stormont told Vergennes that it was “a wild, and extravagant idea, the execution of which, would never be suffered here.” Vergennes replied, according to Stormont, “with great seeming openness, that what Franklin had, or had not brought, he could not pretend to say. Je n’ai pas fouille dans ses portefeuilles [I did not search through his papers], but this I can say, that if he has such letters, he never will make use of them here, upon a thing of this nature . . . I can answer you at once, and in the most positive manner, from what I know of His Majesty’s fixed resolution, which is not to suffer, any armament, or enrollment whatever, to be made in his dominions, in favor of the Americans.”
David Murray, 2nd Earl of Mansfield, known as Lord Stormont. Painted by Sylvester Harding, circa 1760–1809.
In early 1777, when the first few American privateers were allowed to enter French ports, Stormont rushed back to Vergennes’s office in a rage to lodge a formal protest. He used the same arguments that Britain had employed to object to the open embrace of privateers in Martinique—namely, that the privateers were pirates, and welcoming them violated the Treaty of Utrecht. Vergennes, ever the nimble diplomat, reassured Stormont that France would most certainly uphold its treaty obligations. American privateers would not be allowed to use French ports, except in cases of distress, as the treaty allowed. Nor would France sanction the commissioning of privateers from French shores.
Vergennes was deceiving Stormont. He signaled to the Americans early on that their privateers would be allowed to dispose of their prizes as long as they did so in a manner that gave the appearance of complying with treaty restrictions. That led to some creative solutions, including privateers selling their prizes far away from French ports to Frenchmen who, in turn, brought the prizes in as their own vessels. Other times, privateers would remain offshore, where they would disguise their prize as something other than a British merchantman. A skeleton crew would then sail the prize into Dunkirk (Dunkerque) or other French ports where it would be sold, whereupon the crew would return to its privateer, flush with cash. American privateers also made liberal use of the “distress” clause in the treaty, claiming that their prizes were leaking, for instance, allowing the French to let them in. Once in port, the prize could quickly and quietly be sold. As one nineteenth-century historian observed, “Distress, of course, became a chronic condition of the American privateers in European waters.” Vergennes also let Franklin commission privateers, though he had to do it secretly so as not to further arouse British suspicion.
Franklin’s reception at the court of France, 1778, by Anton Hohenstein, circa 1860. Franklin was arguably the most famous American of the day, and certainly the most revered, not only for his scientific accomplishments and inventions but for his political, philosophical, and literary genius. It was his diplomatic skill, however, that proved most important to the American cause, playing a critical role in bringing the French into the war on the American side.
Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, circa 1774–1789.
Vergennes, and the French government he represented, wanted to aid the Americans for selfish reasons. Not only would American privateers inflict pain on their historic enemies,‡ but France feared that if it didn’t aid the Americans, the latter might make peace with Britain—the very thing that the Committee of Foreign Affairs had warned might happen if France didn’t act. Peace would ruin France’s chances of delivering a crushing blow to the British Empire, and of dominating the trade that France believed would result from an independent United States. Yet France also didn’t want to anger the British so much that the two empires would go to war again—at least not yet. France was still rebuilding its military might and wasn’t ready to fight the British. And the French were not yet convinced that the Americans could beat Britain, with or without French help, so they wanted to bide their time until backing the Americans emerged as the obvious move. Thus Vergennes stuck with his privateering charade—telling Stormont one thing, but secretly doing another—walking a diplomatic tightrope.
His act didn’t fool Stormont, who not only had plentiful evidence of privateers coming and going at French ports but also had a network of spies, including the American commission’s private secretary, Edward Bancroft, who fed him information about Franklin’s designs. Stormont knew exactly what was going on, and he was irate. As the number of American privateers frequenting French ports grew in 1777, and Franklin began handing out privateering commissions, Stormont repeatedly demanded that the French stop aiding the Americans and at one point threatened to immediately return to London unless France clamped down on privateering. Vergennes kept brushing aside Stormont’s concerns, either claiming ignorance of American actions—asserting that the privateers were “leaking” and were let into French ports on compassionate grounds—or stating that France was giving American privateers no assistance whatsoever. Vergennes would promise to look into the matter, only to delay the response and come back claiming that nothing untoward was going on. He would also claim that “American” prizes that concerned Stormont actually had French or Dutch owners. Occasionally the French made moves to restrict privateering, arresting privateersmen or seizing a prize, but these were minor actions intended to assuage British concerns, and soon enough the French would revert to form, allowing privateering to proceed.
In early July 1777, Lord Weymouth wrote to Stormont to comment on American strategy for managing the two empires and on the centrality of privateering to that strategy. “The views of the rebels are evident. They know that the honor of this country, and the proper feelings of the people in general will not submit to such open violation of solemn treaties and established laws acknowledged by all nations. The necessary consequence must be a war, which is the object they have in view, and they are not delicate in the choice of means that may bring about an end so much desired by them.” But Britain was preoccupied with the Americans and, like France, wanted to avoid another war with its imperial rival. So the British could do little but fume.
Franklin and his fellow American commissioners were convinced that privateering was helping their cause with the French while at the same time injuring Britain. “That which makes the greatest impression in our favor here,” wrote the commissioners to Congress, “is the prodigious success of our armed ships and privateers. . . . This mode of exerting our force against them should be pushed with vigor. It is that in which we can most sensibly hurt” the British. Franklin was delighted with France’s support of American privateers. “England is extremely exasperated [by] . . . the favor our armed vessels have met with here,” he told Congress, in a letter in early September 1777.
Deane, too, was thrilled with France’s double game. In a letter to Morris in late August 1777, he told of the many American privateers putting in at French ports to dispose of prizes they had captured in the waters around Great Britain. Such actions had, he gleefully noted, “been of infinite prejudice to our enemies, both to their commerce and reputation—nothing can be more humiliating to these once proud lords of the ocean then the insults they receive on their own coasts and from those they so lately despised.”
At about the same time, William Carmichael, secretary to the commissioners, boasted to C. W. F. Dumas, a Swiss national who acted as secret agent for the Continental Congress in Holland, about a Maryland ferryboat turned privateer that had captured five British ships in the English Channel. Carmichael knew the diminutive twenty-ton ferryboat well, having crossed Chesapeake Bay on it on more than one occasion. He was proud of its privateering success against much larger vessels, and he shared with Dumas a recent conversation he had had with a high-ranking British official. The haughty Briton had told him, Carmichael wrote, “that resistance was a chimera in us, since their armed vessels would swarm so much in our rivers as even to intercept the ferryboats.” As Carmichael put it, “His assertions are verified vice versa; our ferryboats ruin their commerce.” Carmichael added in a postscript that when the captain of the Maryland privateer boarded a British transport and told its captain that he was a prisoner, the astonished man “very insolently asked where his ship was, not conceiving that any person would have crossed the ocean in so small a boat.”
And Carmichael, like the commissioners he served, hoped that privateers would help spark war between France and Britain. “It is our business,” he wrote to Bingham in July 1777, “to force on a war in spite of their inclinations to the contrary, for which purpose I see nothing so likely as fitting out privateers from the ports and islands of France.”
The situation was changing, however. From the end of 1776 through the summer of 1777, British commerce in its home waters had faced constant harassment. The London Annual Register ruefully noted “that the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland were insulted by the American privateers in a manner which our hardiest enemies had never ventured on in our most arduous contentions with foreigners. Thus were the inmost and most domestic recesses of our trade rendered insecure; and a convoy for the protection of the linen ships from Dublin and Newry was now for the first time seen.”
London’s Public Advertiser bemoaned the fact “that the greatest encouragement is given not only . . . [at Dunkirk] but all over France, to the fitting out of privateers against the English; that no less than thirty are now equipping in different ports of that Kingdom, and that they want only a sufficient number of American captains to send them all out. . . . Franklin is permitted to grant letters of marque to every ship that is commanded by a native of his own continent.” Another day, the same paper asserted that if France continued to allow American privateers to sally forth from French ports to attack British ships, “an immediate war between France and this country will be the inevitable consequence.”
One of the most spectacular examples of an American privateer benefiting from French hospitality concerned the Massachusetts privateer General Mifflin, captained by William Day. On a cruise off the coast of England in the summer of 1777, the privateer captured twelve British vessels. In honor of their success, the men on board composed a song, one stanza of which went as follows:
Let England’s boasted Navy,
Return to guard their coast;
For while they war in foreign climes,
Their native wealth is lost.
But they (once conquering tars) no more laurel’d wreath shall wear;
We’ll rend them from their vanquished brows to grace our privateer.
Day sailed to the French port city of Brest with a few of his prizes in tow. As he entered the harbor, he found a French squadron anchored there, under the command of Admiral Louis Charles du Chaffault de Besné. Day gave the squadron a customary seven-gun salute. According to a contemporary account, this display of respect caused du Chaffault considerable consternation. “A council of war was held therefore immediately, when, after an hour and a half’s consultation, it was agreed to return the salute, which was done in form, as to the vessel of a sovereign independent state.” When Stormont learned of this, he was apoplectic, and demanded that the General Mifflin be sent from the port, which it was, eventually, but not before it sold some of its prizes and its crew was treated royally. As Day later recounted, “We were permitted to go into the King’s dock at Brest, to clean (a privilege never granted to a Briton) and when there, received every assistance we could expect, both from the gentlemen of the navy and army, of his Most Christian Majesty.”
Britain placed the blame for the maritime assaults in their home waters squarely on the American privateers’ being aided and abetted by France. But this was only partially correct. While it is true that American privateers used French ports to dispose of their prizes, and many privateers received letters of marque from Franklin, more than a few of the American vessels attacking the British and selling their prizes in France were not privateers at all. Some were Continental navy ships, or ships hired by Franklin and his fellow commissioners and placed under the command of naval officers, making them, in effect, part of the official navy. The cruises of four naval ships, Surprise, Reprisal, Lexington, and Dolphin, captured twenty prizes combined. Additionally, some of the American vessels seizing British ships in the vicinity of Great Britain had no connection to France. These included privateers sailing from the American states that sent their prizes back home, and privateers as well as naval ships that sent their prizes to friendly ports in Spain and Holland. Nevertheless, the British government, British merchants, and the British press didn’t make fine distinctions. To them, all the American ships attacking British merchantmen, both around Great Britain and in the Caribbean, were privateers, and most of those were being supported by France. By midsummer of 1777, Britain reached a breaking point over the issue.
